DC Studios’ Supergirl is hitting global theaters this week, but audiences in India are getting a noticeably sanitized cut. Ahead of the highly anticipated June 24-26 rollout, India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) demanded strict edits to the movie, targeting explicit language and offensive gestures to secure a UA rating. The censorship board has a long history of heavily editing Hollywood blockbusters to meet its strict decency guidelines, and this latest DC installment starring Milly Alcock and Jason Momoa is no exception.
The officially certified Indian theatrical release clocks in at exactly 109 minutes and 58 seconds. To get that runtime approved, editors had to mute several explicit terms in both the dialogue and subtitles, including the words “wh**e”, “b***h”, and “balls”. The CBFC also forced the visual deletion of a middle finger gesture and mandated the inclusion of anti-smoking and anti-alcohol disclaimers throughout the film.
Hollywood studios are increasingly familiar with these late-stage content demands. The board faced severe fan backlash just last year after cutting a 33-second mid-air kiss from James Gunn’s 2025 Superman film for being deemed overly sensual. Similar mandates recently forced Marvel to mute expletives in Thunderbolts* and required the producers of the Brad Pitt racing film F1 to swap out a middle-finger emoji for a fist emoji.
International distributors remain effectively powerless to dispute these rulings. The Indian government dissolved the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) in 2021, entirely removing the dedicated appeals process for filmmakers. Without the FCAT, studios like Warner Bros. must either accept the mandated cuts or take their fight to India’s High Courts. That legal route is simply too costly and time-consuming to execute when a global release date is already locked on the calendar.